Professionalism and focus, win-win cooperation 2020 has passed, and we have ushered in a new year. At the beginning of the new year, let's review the achievements of the Filecoin community and network in 2020. Although the highlight of 2020 was the mainnet launch in October, all members of the community have known for many years that 2020 was full of some major updates and ecosystem highlights. Let's take a look together~ May 2020: Expanded storage Filecoin Discover was launched during Filecoin’s testnet days as a way to incentivize Filecoin nodes to store valuable data and earn extra FIL in the process. The Discover program is based on compensating Filecoin nodes for selecting data from the Filecoin Discover Store, a library of valuable data covering literature, science, art, and history. Nodes that wish to join the Filecoin network can visit the site, select the datasets they want to store, and receive them on drives at cost. Many of the lessons learned from the R&D and community engagement phases of Filecoin Discover helped shape the Filecoin Plus program. Filecoin Discover continues to advance Filecoin’s mission to create a decentralized, efficient, and powerful foundation for humanity’s information. At the end of 2019, we launched the first phase of the Filecoin testnet. In May 2020, we launched the second phase. Testnet 2 is the last major milestone before the mainnet launch. In this update, we released two interoperable Filecoin implementations (Filecoin and Lotus) , security proofs (WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt) , Drand’s overview of the network’s cryptoeconomic structure, a new documentation site, and a new security audit. June: Preparing for mainnet launch By June, we were full speed ahead towards mainnet launch. We announced Filecoin Ignite, a schedule of multiple events that would bring together builders, node operators, researchers, enthusiasts, and other network participants before (and beyond) launch. This mainnet launch announcement included HackFS, the Spark University Hackathon, Space Race 1 and 2, and the newly announced Filecoin Frontier Accelerator. July: Activate the community August marked the completion of our inaugural HackFS hackathon. In a little over a month, 134 teams worked on projects across the Filecoin ecosystem. In total, over 470 hackers from 50 countries across 19 time zones participated in the 30-day virtual event. Check out the full bios of the top 10 finalist teams: Sailplane, Public Annotation Network (PAN) Protocol, Pnlp, BlockSig, Valist, IPFS Recovery, PlanetFlare, Web3API, Decentralized Docker Hub, and Pygate. Space Race 1 was a three-week competition to incentivize nodes to add storage to the network and hit transaction quality targets. During the competition, miners competed for a prize of 4M FIL. At the end of the competition, 230PiB of storage was added to the network - more than 2x the original goal. 400 nodes from six continents participated in the event, and the lessons learned led to eight network upgrades, including dozens of bug and performance fixes. The community also hosted a series of technical talks, workshops, and deep dives, which can be found on the Filecoin Youtube channel. In August, we published the Filecoin Economic Model Report, a 34-page overview of how the Filecoin protocol aligns incentives and realistically rewards useful and reliable storage. The Filecoin network’s economic design seeks to align incentives and realistically reward useful and reliable storage with as few rules as possible. The protocol’s many mechanisms and incentives are carefully designed with a single goal in mind: if participants in the network’s economy pursue their own interests, the network should grow and prosper. September: Mainnet Ignition Space Race 1 was a huge success, which meant the preparation and launch of Space Race 2. In September, we launched Space Race 2 to continue onboarding storage to the network, and introduced a new Slingshot track for Filecoin clients, application developers, and tool developers to deploy their products to the testnet. As a result, application developers stored more than 650 TiB of data in 520,000 transactions. These transactions were reached by more than 100 projects in 19 countries. For their efforts, these players received 59,850 FIL in the total prize pool of the first stage of the Slingshot competition. Slate is a fully open source file sharing network built by Protocol Labs for Filecoin for research and collaboration. Slate allows users to store data, organize data, and share it with the world securely. The launch of Slate brought more than 600 new accounts and became the fifth-ranked product of the day on ProductHunt. To date, Slate has stored nearly 200GB of user data. The date we’ve all been waiting for, October 15, 2020 at 3pm UTC, the Filecoin network went live. This moment marks the culmination of years of innovation and hard work by the Filecoin community. A huge thank you to everyone who has dedicated their time, ideas, and expertise to make Filecoin a reality. To celebrate the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, the community held the Filecoin Liftoff event, a week-long event dedicated entirely to the Filecoin ecosystem, from October 19th to 23rd. Speakers from around the world and across the Web3 ecosystem joined us to discuss their projects and the Filecoin network. Over 2,000 participants delivered over 82,000 sessions on YouTube over the past 5 days. Filecoin Liftoff was led by 84 delegates with 81 speakers representing all players in the Filecoin community – application developers, vendors, storage clients, policymakers, human rights activists, and more! The event was covered by more than 280 articles, including CoinDesk, Decrypt, Fortune, Morning Consult, The Block and Investing.com. November: First Milestone Less than four weeks after the mainnet launch, the Filecoin community celebrated its first major milestone in November. As of November 24, the network’s decentralized storage capacity exceeded 1 exbibyte (EiB). How much is an exbibyte? 1 EiB is enough to store: 290 million 1080p movies, 4,500 Wikipedias, 685,000 years of continuous video calls, or 19 copies of the entire Internet Archive. December: Ecosystem Economics The Filecoin community, together with ETH Global, hosted a 1-day Packaged Storage Market Summit. The day was divided into five themed “blocks” where developers, investors, and partners from the Filecoin ecosystem provided in-depth discussions and overviews of different aspects of the Filecoin network and its economy. Looking Ahead: Filecoin in 2021 If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the Filecoin community has an extraordinary capacity for innovation. The vast majority of what the community accomplished in 2020 was accomplished through the Filecoin testnet. Now, we’re looking ahead to 2021 and beyond on the Filecoin mainnet. Congratulations to the entire Filecoin community for a brilliant 2020! Let’s continue to create its own glory in the coming 2021!
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